Sir Henry Parker’s father was a prominent courtier, an accomplished translator and author, and a close friend of Cromwell. One of his daughters married George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, and Parker himself was to be connected, through his second marriage, with the Boleyn family.

The beginnings of Parker’s career are obscure. The man of that name who was page of the chamber and gentleman usher from 1514 was probably a namesake, perhaps Henry Parker of Berden, Essex.[5]

By his marriage to Grace Newport, who was only eight in 1523, Parker acquired the manors of Furneux Pelham and Stapleford, and in 1536 he procured a private Act (28 Hen. VIII c.20) settling his two Norfolk manors on himself and his wife, in lieu of the jointure that he had covenanted to make her on marriage. In 1541 the under sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire was sued for abducting a 14 year-old ward, Jane Barenton, who had been contracted in marriage to the younger John Newport, presumably Parker’s brother-in-law. Parker was apparently a party to the abduction, for his servants escorted the girl in her flight from her guardian and helped her to elude him in London.[6]

Parker was knighted at Anne Boleyn’s coronation and served regularly on Hertfordshire commissions from 1535. It is possible that he sat in the short Parliament of 1536, for which the Hertfordshire returns have not survived; it was that Parliament which passed the Act relating to the settlement on Grace Parker, although such an uncontroversial measure hardly required Parker’s presence in the Commons as well as his father’s in the Lords. His election for Hertfordshire in 1539 is to be explained by his father’s closeness to Cromwell and his own leading position in his county. In two letters to Cromwell (probably of 1536) Parker reported his imprisonment of two parsons who had disobeyed the royal injunctions against superstitious holy days, and begged Cromwell to help his chaplain, whom the bishop of London’s surveyor was suing for no good reason.

Parker explained that he knew ‘the love and favour which ... your lordship always hath borne to the word of God and to all them which endeavour to set forth the King’s most godly and gracious injunctions’ and interpreted the action against his chaplain as an attack by the conservative Bishop Stokesley on himself.

He attended at court on ceremonial occasions, such as the christening of Prince Edward and the reception of Anne of Cleves. He was also called on for military service, his name appearing in lists of Hertfordshire gentlemen to serve against the northern rebels in 1536, and eight years later he was with the rearguard of the army in France. In April 1536 he had a grant from the crown of the dissolved priory of Latton, Essex, which he sold, with other land, five years later. He was assessed in Hertfordshire for the subsidy, his lands there being valued at £100 a year in 1546, which made him one of the county’s ten or 12 richest men.[7]

Parker retained interests in Norfolk which involved him in several Star Chamber cases. One of these concerned rights of common at Hingham, where he wished to pasture 500 sheep. His alleged enclosure of Hingham common was one of the grievances of the Norfolk peasantry at the time of in his unsuccessful attempt to put down the rebellion in August.[8]

Under Edward VI Parker was appointed to most of the important commissions for Hertfordshire. He was not immediately chosen knight of the shire in 1547 but was elected on 24 Oct., less than a fortnight before the Parliament met, to fill the vacancy left by the death of Sir Anthony Denny on the previous 10 Sept. A bill ‘for increase of trees and woods’ was committed to him on 5 Nov. 1549, after its first reading.

His parliamentary career ended before the following and last session of this Parliament began, for he died on 6 Jan. 1552. The Privy Council sent instructions on 19 Jan. following for a second by-election in Hertfordshire and recommended Sir Ralph Sadler as the fittest person; it was nevertheless John Cock II who was elected.

Parker died during the lifetime of his father. The inquisition post mortem taken in Norfolk thus mentioned only the two manors settled on Parker and his first wife to provide her jointure and valued at £50 a year; the larger of these, Hingham, had been re-settled for the benefit of Parker’s second wife, Elizabeth, who later married Sir William Woodhouse and Dru Drury†.

Parker’s heir was his eldest son Henry, aged 20 years and 11 months at his father’s death; he did not share his father’s religious views, but fled to the Continent in Elizabeth’s reign and became one of the leading English Catholic exiles there. No will of Parker’s has been found.[9]

mar. bef. 1505 Alice St John (bur. 23 Nov 1553 at Great Hallingbury, co. Essex), dau. of Sir John St John, of Bletsoe, co. Bedford (by his wife Alice Bradshaigh, dau. of Thomas Bradshaigh, of Haigh, co. Lancaster), 1st son and heir of Sir Oliver St John, of Penmark, co. Glamorgan, by his wife Margaret Beauchamp, de jure suo jure Baroness Beauchamp of Bletsoe (mar. (2) John [Beaufort], 1st Duke of Somerset, and was grandmother of King Henry VII), sister and hrss. of John [Beauchamp], 4th Baron Beauchamp of Bletsoe, and only dau. of John [Beauchamp], 3rd Baron Beauchamp, by his wife Edith Stourton, dau. of Sir John Stourton

children

'1. Hon Sir Henry Parker, Page of the Chamber to King Henry VIII 1516, created a Knight of the Bath at the Coronation of Queen Anne Boleyn 1533 (dvp. 6 Jan 1551/2), mar. (1) 18 May 1523 Grace Newport, dau. and hrss. of John Newport, of Pelham Furneux, and had issue: